


Only the Dead Don't Have Faith

by pinstripedJackalope



Series: Keith's Binder [4]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Bank Robbery, Betaed, Bisexual Lance (Voltron), Crimes & Criminals, Crossdressing, FBI Agent Pidge Gunderson, Gay Keith (Voltron), Heist, Human Experimentation, Human Trafficking, Hunk and Shay are nurses, Keith and Shiro are bank robbers, Lance and Allura are paramedics, M/M, Organized Crime, Pidge has a secret identity, Science Fiction, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Soulmates, Trans Female Pidge | Katie Holt, Trans Keith (Voltron), but she crossdresses as a guy for her alias, i'm tagging as i go, you know how it is
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-11
Updated: 2018-12-28
Packaged: 2019-03-03 10:05:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 19,286
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13338960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pinstripedJackalope/pseuds/pinstripedJackalope
Summary: There are a thousand ways to find your soulmate, and that's a fact.  There's even a musical about it.  Pidge isn't really into musical theater, at least not as her latest alias--Pidge Gunderson is a more 'down to earth' kind of guy, so she saves her sing-alongs for when she's quite alone.  That isn't the point.  The point here is that there are a THOUSAND WAYS to find your soulmate, and the one that Lance Alvarez chooses?  Is the one that's going to bring her currently low-stress life crashing down around her ears.





	1. If You Give A Boy A Soulmark

**Author's Note:**

> THANK YOU tumblr's @carterrowanne for being awesome and helping me edit! They are the BEST beta reader, so make sure to check them out at carterrowanne.tumblr.com!
> 
> A SECOND THANK YOU to @anamorph-marco for beta-ing these last few chapters!
> 
> And a note: in this verse, Shiro is bisexual instead of gay. I know he's canonically homosexual and I'm thrilled about it! HOWEVER: this AU was created before that information ever came out, and I can't let go of that sweet sweet Shallura. If that's not your thing, that's cool! Just letting you know that I'm not going to edit out what I've already got planned. 
> 
> Cheers!

On August 31st, 20XX, the persona known as Pidge Gunderson was revealed to be connected to a series of robberies striking the bank accounts of high-ranking politicians from Washington, DC to Seattle, Washington.  Just two days prior, on August 29th, the story of the Paladins finally broke after three months of internal investigation at the FBI.  Officially, the robberies were said to have been committed by the Black Lions, two operatives of an underground operation called the Blade of Marmora.  According to the police statement of one of the Lions after his arrest, they ‘liberated millions with the sole purpose of bankrupting business mogul Zarkon’s expansive Empire’.  A lofty goal, one made possible by the might of the Paladins, a quasi-government group that used FBI resources to dish out vigilante justice via anonymous hacking.  The Empire, by all accounts, could not have stood up to the Blade, the Lions, and the Paladins united… but there was one person, one man, whose touch appeared like a ghost in every unwinding detail.  What was his role, his significance?  Who was Mr. Gunderson?  By the time his name was linked to first the Lions, then the robberies, then the Paladins, Pidge Gunderson himself had disappeared.  No trace of him existed—at least, none beyond the skeletal remnants of the computer virus that ate through the evidence even as the FBI scrambled to copy enough of it to bring to court.

It was a tale that practically wove itself into a blockbuster movie.  Day after day, the media uncovered more sordid details to add as the stories broke: a missing FBI analyst caught up in not one, but two factions of the criminal underground; nationwide corruption and huge amounts of illegal money funneled through Zarkon’s Empire; rebels turned vigilantes; two soulmates, one on either side of the law.  And at its epicenter, the secret eye of the storm, was Mr. Gunderson—a name and an identity that fell apart the moment the public had barely begun to grasp it.

That’s not to say that Pidge didn’t exist.  No, far to the contrary— _she_ definitely existed, and she was definitely _pissed_.  The whole mess was her own fault.  It all started the day she was having a casual hang with one dear, innocent friend and she happened to mention that one of her primary tasks at the FBI was identifying soulprints on dead bodies.

 

* * *

 

 

“They _what_?”

Lance, loud as ever, had her wincing into her mojito.  It was hardly newsworthy to her at that point—why exactly he sounded so thrilled was beyond her.  The novelty of learning that soulprints, even ones that hadn’t been actuated yet, were visible under black lights?  Yeah, that novelty wore off her first week on the job.  She thought it was cool, sure, but she was hired as a data analyst; actually being at crime scenes, with blood and gore and… offal and shit was jarring enough an experience that it sucked a little bit of the fun out of the science.  It’s hard to be happy learning a new fact about soulmarks when you’re knuckle-deep in a puddle of formerly-human fluids.

She spared Lance the details.  She was here to get drunk, not to watch him immediately turn and parrot a bunch of gross facts at a gaggle of women like that’ll lure them into his manly arms.

Besides, her forensics work at the FBI was not something she generally talked about.  She worked at the bureau because her family wanted good things for her after the complete and utter MESS her dad and older brother got into.  Good things, and legal money, for a certain definition of legal.  She didn’t ponder aloud the potential ramifications that working at the FBI had for someone whose closest family was so far in money troubles that they were currently in hiding, and she didn’t encourage anyone else to ponder them, either—especially on nights like tonight, when she was decidedly NOT on call and was allowed to get smashed on her downtime.  If she had ulterior motives, no one would ever know—they were buried under six layers of identity fraud, and not even four mojitos in a row were going to unearth them.  She had always been a locked box.  Rattling off facts about soulprints to a curious and (more or less) innocent friend was as far as she went when talking about her forensics work with the FBI.  At least… as far as Lance knew.  Innocent, innocent, _IDIOT_ Lance.

Lance was one of those people that could talk to you once and make you feel like you’d known him for an entire lifetime.  He had an eye for observation, one that manifested as the perfect mastery of knowing when to play up his own narcissism.  He never got angry that he knew almost nothing about Pidge’s home life or her distant past—he just cracked a joke on top of every awkward silence until he and his companion both forgot that there was a question unanswered.  He was content with that, and Pidge was grateful.  

At the beginning of that fateful friend-date at the bar, she was absolutely convinced that was how their relationship would always be.  Him, a playboy covering up for his deep empathy for other humans by flirting at anything animate, and her, another human who kept more secrets than not and got along using quick wit and copious, copious amounts of applied technical skills.  That night, Lance was there to have a good time with a friend.  She was there to get drunk.  They were there together to have some hoots for a bit before they both had to return to their day jobs.

Which was, in the relentless grip of retro-vision, the reason that one offhand comment about black lights caused her to dig one big, giant hole for herself, the FBI, several crime syndicates, the once-innocent Lance, and two friends who weren’t exactly on the legal side of things.  Such is life, she supposed.  You mention in passing that unactuated soulprints act like invisible ink and suddenly, inexplicably, your whole life is turned inside out.

Back to the present.  She’d known for a while that soulprints didn’t _just_ _appear_ when your soulmate touched you.  Lance Alvarez, it seemed, did not.  Judging by the slack-jawed look he was giving her, at least.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa—you mean you can just… take a peep at your destiny?  Casually, at any rave spot in the inner-city area?”

“Yeah, if they have four-hundred watt bulbs,” Pidge said, forgetting to mention that it was illegal for a public institution to have black lights strong enough to view soulmarks.  She licked at her straw until she got it in her mouth, and then she took a thoughtful (if a little messy) sip of her mojito.  There were so many laws that had to do with soulmarks—why was that?  What made marks so damn important?  In her intoxicated state, her curious mind latched right on to the train of thought, and she spent a good few seconds staring off into the distance.

Lance, meanwhile, was already standing up.  She frowned, amber eyes squinted at him until he caught on to her confusion.  He tapped the table in a rhythm that was probably supposed to be a drumroll.  “Well, aren’t you coming with me?”

“Where?” she asked, still too many steps behind his impulsivity to make any sense of him.

“To the nearest rave!  To destiny!” he said.  The impish grin made her snort.

“No.  That’s dumb.  I have a better idea for your peeping,” she said, and started the arduous task of focusing her eyes long enough to call for an Uber.

If mentioning soulmarks was her first mistake, then letting Lance into the FBI van that she was supposed to use for Official FBI Business Only was the second.  At the time, she couldn’t care less how gross a breach of security it was.  She didn’t care much about that, anyway—maybe that was the real first mistake.  Not giving a shit about your high-security government job _almost always_ comes back to bite you in the ass.

Unaware, Pidge couldn’t help but laugh as Lance shucked off his shirt and stood in a T-pose, trying not to list too heavily to one side or the other as he schooled his face into a Serious Expression.  She poked him in the side with the black light wand, everything swimming headily about her as the alcohol in her system pumped around in her cells.  He batted at her hair as it tickled his stomach—she prodded him again.  They giggled at each other.  Then, getting serious, she told him to stand still and let her do her job.

The most common places a soulprint will manifest are the hands and arms, followed by shoulders and back.  Joints tended to be slightly more likely than not—elbows, knees, hips, and shoulders were always good bets.  Faces were, surprisingly, very low on the list—they cashed in after the lower back and buttocks.  Dead last were genitalia, followed by feet, and right above those, at only 0.7% of Prints, was the neck.

“I’m not putting your ass in the scanner if I find it on your asscheeks,” Pidge slurred, smacking him to the side so he’d raise his leg for her.  She was having a lot of difficulties, what with having to utilize hand-eye coordination and all.  She was fairly certain, though, that a sweep of his front came up with nothing.

“Your scanner would be lucky to have my ass in it,” Lance said with a smarmy grin.  He was a moment late, timing off and train of thought nearly derailing as he tripped over some wires and put his face into a cabinet.  “Say, what’s this for?” he asked, making to grab the forensic instrument that he was pressing his nose against.  He let go with a yelp when she pulled one of his feet out from under him to check the sole of that foot.

Pidge grunted, letting the foot back down.  “Oh shit, I don’t think you have one,” she muttered.  He let out a high-pitched whine.  “Oh no wait, hold on…”

“Did you find it?” he asked desperately, trying to twist around to see and making it about six times more difficult to get a good look at the glowing splotch on the back of his neck.

“Yeah… this is a funny spot for a Print, dude, like what on earth are you gonna do to have the First Touch be on the back of your neck?”

“Really?  Maybe they’ll pull me in for a kiss.  How romantic would that be?”

Grunting at the doe-eyed swoon she could clearly hear in his voice, Pidge shoved him down into a seat so she could get a scan without him swaying around and screwing up the picture.  “Dunno, but my bet’s on them trying to strangle you.”

“Rude.”

“You haven’t seen the things I’ve seen,” she intoned.  And then, after an obnoxious beep that caused Lance to jump in his seat, “Scan’s ready!”

They checked the forums first.  It was entry level dark internet shit, the kind of shit that Pidge had been into when she first started to hack at the age of seven.  There was one old-timey law still in place stating that a person was not supposed to try and view a soulmark before its actuation, a holdover from the days when they were still considered a Mark from God.  Technically, because of that, any posting of an unactuated Print was illegal.  No one really gave a shit these days, what with internet dating and all, but websites could still be taken down for displaying unactuated Prints, so into the dark web they went.  Sweet catholic school boys like Lance had never had reason to stray into the dark side of the internet in search of shit that was ‘technically’ illegal.  This was obviously his first time.  He was nearly vibrating.

Pidge entered the scan into one of the larger matching sites and waited a minute or so, wishing she’d thought ahead to pack an extra mojito.  Lance latched himself onto her side, neglecting her jibe to _put his damn clothes back on already_ in favor of staring at the screen like a sappy loon waiting for princess charming.

“You wanna know how many criminals get caught each year because they were stupid enough to put their finger pints in a Print search database in our state alone?” Pidge asked, and without waiting for a response, told him, “Fifteen hundred.  That’s over a thousand, Lance.  Idiots.”

The computer beeped.

Negative.  No match found.

“Is that it?” Lance demanded, draping himself over her shoulders.  It was not, and Pidge told him as much—there were still a couple of other sites she knew that they could try.  Ten minutes later, however, they’d exhausted every matching site that Pidge could think of.

Lance’s face fell.

“Awww… this means you’ll find them the natural way,” Pidge said.  Reassurance wasn’t her strong point, but Lance seemed to take it in stride, shaking it off with a laugh.

“Or maybe we’re just not looking in the right place,” he said, tapping drunkenly on his nose like he had a big secret.  Pidge groaned at his shitty grin, and pinched his exposed nipple until he yelled and said, “Fine, fine, quit the torture!  I was just gonna say that maybe I’ll find a match in like, the criminal print base.”

“The federal print base, you mean?” Pidge asked, frowning again.  Every time Lance had an idea, especially a drunken idea, it always turned into a dumpster fire.  There was something about Lance that just attracted disaster—it happened with alarming consistency, from the facebook fallout of the fake-dating prank to the ‘let’s go dumpster diving and whoops, was that my lighter?’ emergency room trip that she _wished_ she could forget.   They’d only made it this far tonight because _she_ was the main driving force, not his awful impulse control.  

Their good luck, whatever small amount of it there was, was running out.  “Yeah, yeah, that,” Lance said, grabbing her by the arm and shaking her excitedly.  “Oh man, think of how funny it would be!  It would be the best soul-meeting story _ever_!”

Even four mojitos weren’t enough to think that an unauthorized search for a civilian’s soulprint during a drunken, security-shattering FBI break-in was a good idea.  Unfortunately, Pidge’s confidence didn’t get that memo.  She was juuust cocky enough that her drunk mouth said, “Sure, why not?” and two minutes later her fingers were pecking out the code that would hide their search from everyone but them.  It wasn’t like the search would actually come back with a result—there was no way that Lance, the paramedic who lived three miles outside of the city and biked to work every day rain or shine, was going to find his soulmate in anyone who was important enough or criminal enough to have their prints in the FBI’s print database.

Maybe that was it.  The actual biggest mistake of the night.  Thinking that Lance Alvarez couldn’t _possibly_ get in enough trouble to involve himself with the criminal underworld.  That was probably the moment of hubris that brought her down, because the moment she hit the enter button, there was an instantaneous match.  Marked red for wanted criminal.

Pidge felt herself sober instantly.  How in the FUCK did Lance mama’s-boy-once-voted-Most-Likely-to-Work-Fast-Food-for-the-Rest-of-His-Life Alvarez have a federal criminal as a soulmate?  Lance gets-antsy-and-laughs-nervously-whenever-people-talk-about-cheating-on-exams-in-college Alvarez?   _Lance_ tries-to-be-a-badboy-but-actually-cried-one-time-when-they-saw-a-pug-wearing-a-sweater _Alvarez_?

The second punch to the gut came when she clicked on the profile.  It wasn’t just any federal criminal—it was one of the notorious Black Lions, the mystery-clouded agents of chaos whose file was several hundred pages of high-profile bank robberies.

…She thought she erased that print.

_That print wasn’t supposed to match anything; it wasn’t supposed to exist._

“…Holy shit?” Lance breathed, next to her, one of his arms knotted in the shirt that he was trying to get back on.

“Holy shit,” she said right back, an abstract sense of terror growing in her guts that made her veins run glacially cold.  “Holy _shit_.”


	2. ...Then You Better Have An Ambulance Handy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pidge forgets to call a window washer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Special thanks to @anamorph-marco on tumblr for beta-ing for me this time around!

_September 3 rd, 20XX_

_Who hasn’t heard the recent story of the Black Lions?  Two permanent residents of the FBI’s most-wanted list for three years running, one of which has finally been apprehended in the name of Justice… it’s hard to escape the buzz.  The controversy with the FBI’s ousted mole, allegations of involvement in human trafficking against Dawson P. Zarkon and his multi-billion-dollar manufacturing empire, the willing surrender of Keith Kogane to authorities nearly two weeks ago—it’s the talk of the nation.  In all honesty, you’re probably as exhausted with the whirlwind of information as I am at the close of week two of the non-stop news blitz.  The sensationalism has worn off!  Let it go already!  What else could we possibly need to know?!_

_Well, the answer is that you need to see these photos of Keith Kogane, the Black Lion currently in the Arusia supermax unit, just minutes before his surrender._

_Here he is, on Tenth Avenue, in footage captured by a jewelry store security cam.  8:39 PM.  And here he is again, in police custody, at 8:43 PM.  Can you spot the difference in these blurry stills?  I’ll give you a hint—pay close attention to the back of his neck._

_That, my fellow Buzzfeed readers, is a recently actuated Soulprint—so recent, in fact, that we know it must have occurred literally less than a minute before that second pic was snapped.  Take note of the slight glow on the underside of his hair if you don’t believe me.  There’s no faking this stuff._

_The question now is: who the hell is the mystery soulmate?_

_And if you’ve gotten this far and you can’t believe I tricked you into reading all of this, let me ask you a more pointed question: if there was a mole in the FBI, who is to say Kogane’s life partner isn’t one of the police officers who apprehended him, making this entire thing one HELL of a case of collusion?_

_Is the public safe?  Is the government trustworthy?  How much of the fragile state of the union rides on the identity of bank robber Keith Kogane’s soulmate?_

Takashi Shirogane was, unfortunately, the person most qualified to answer such a question.  He was there the first time they met, after all, though ‘met’ was rather kind a word for the ordeal.  It was more of, uh… you know those birds where the male flutters around in a panic trying to get the attention of the female, who is uninterested and probably waiting for the earliest moment she can go home and eat some worms?  That.  That’s what it was.  Also, Keith was semi-conscious at best throughout the entire thing.

Shiro would like it on the record that he wasn’t… bitter about any of this.  Resigned, maybe, but bitter?  Nah.  He’d been through the cataclysmic and life-shattering before.  The second time around was easier than the first, especially because this whole mess, unlike the last one, wasn’t his fault.  It all started the day Katie, alias Pidge Gunderson, the Grid to Keith’s Dagger and his Key, forgot to hire a window washer.

 

* * *

 

The phone rang.

 _Don’t give in_.  Pidge hunched over in the little window seat in the teeny living room of her miniscule apartment, her fingernails scraping along the surface of her keyboard.  She’d decided four hours ago that hangovers and all-nighters were both born from the same pits of Hell, and both at once was transforming her into the physical embodiment of grouchiness.  She would do anything to peel her skin off right now, just to stop it from itching every time it made contact with the air.

The phone rang again.

 _No._ She wasn’t going to give in.  Not now, not ever.  She’d rip herself from the face of the earth before she answered that damn phone.  This was life or death, this was the livelihood of two of her closest friends at stake, and through them, the only connection she still had with Matt.  She had to figure out a way out of this.  _She had to_.

Ring.

Transfers.  Blackmail?  Maybe she should just take down the entire FBI system, erase the whole thing.  Most of it was backed up on paper, but there was enough—enough.  Just enough that she could cripple the department whose job it was to track down the Lions.

Ring.

She just needed time.   _She just needed time_.  Just a _little bit._  Just long enough to devote her full attention to—

 _Ring_.

She scooped up the phone, snarling, “ _What the hell do you want_.”

“I had the weirdest dream,” came the groggy voice she least wanted to hear.  At nine in the morning, Lance was undoubtedly just waking up.  She’d really hoped he would be out for another few hours.  Damn early risers.  There was something small and wondrous in his tone, something that grated horribly against the caffeine tremors wracking Pidge’s small frame, making her ribs rattle like bars in a poorly-made cage.  She desperately wanted to throw her phone out the window.

“Yo.  Pidgey.  Pidge?  Are you going to listen to my weird dream?  It was about you, and also my soulprint.  Aw, dude, it was so wild.”

How many times did she have to swear before God smote her from existence?  She was determined to find out.  Better yet, maybe she could direct His wrath at Lance himself—she was just a bystander here.  A sweet, innocent bystander in the clusterfuck that was Lance Alvarez’s love-life.  There was no doubt to be had as to what ‘dream’ he was referring to.  Soulprints, FBI database, criminal activity, etc etc etc—she was in a bind.  What was the logical course of action to take when the man you desperately tried to get blackout drunk after the Big Reveal defied all odds and _remembered_?

She groaned, knocking her elbows on the wall as she flopped into a fetal position.  Alcohol tolerance could kiss her fucking ass.  All that time she spent sketching equations on the fly onto a barroom napkin; using his body mass, metabolism, and the way he was clear-headed enough to say, “I found my soulmate, Pidgey,” for the eight-hundredth time, trying to calculate how to get him to a point just short of alcohol poisoning, and all of it was for nothing.  She’d been _banking_ on the fact that three of those kickass mixed drinks at the bar down the street from his apartment would rearrange enough of his brain cells that he would remember the entire night as nothing but a giant black rectangle.  And yet, he didn’t even sound _hungover_ as he started rambling on about exactly everything she’d tried to wipe from his mind.  What a waste.  He probably went home and threw everything up, tipping the hangover scales unfairly in his favor.  

It was pathetic how wistful he sounded.  How dare he take that tone, after everything she did to get him to forget?!

Somehow, Pidge couldn’t convince herself to let him live the lie.  He’d find out eventually, she reasoned.  Through gritted teeth, she broke it to him that his fever-dream was actually one-hundred percent pure-grade truth, though she kept the small detail that she personally knew the Black Lions—and was actually their _partner in crime_ —to herself.  He didn’t need to know that bit.

He also didn’t need to know that sixteen people had accessed the Lion’s print in the database before she managed to corrupt the file.  How had she missed it?!

Judging by current events and the mooning boy on her cell, today was going to be the kind of mess that just kept seeping across the kitchen floor no matter how many towels, mops, or mixed drinks she threw at it.  Fuck, this was bad—they had another heist tonight!  Their entire cover could be blown wide open by this! 

“Pidge,” Lance whined.  

No.  No, she could handle this.  She could _fix this_.  

“Piiidge.”  

She just had to drink another cup of coffee and channel Adler.  She could pull them out of this nosedive.  Hacking would be her savior.

“ _Pidge_.”  

A muscle pulsed in her forehead.  How did he hit a pitch that drilled through every cogent thought she was capable of producing so damn _effortlessly_?  It was as relentless as pop-up spam.  How she desperately wished she could hack into _him_ just to make it cease.

“ _Pidgeeey_.”

She couldn’t take this.  She was going to melt into a puddle of screaming pus.  “For the love of god, Lance, _what_?!”

He was finally starting to sound as hungover as he ought to be when he moaned, “How the fuck do you woo a cross-state criminal?”

Thoroughly distracted, not for the first time nor the last, Pidge shuffled about so her feet were on the floor and her head was in one hand, trying to make sense of this.   _Woo_ a…?  He wasn’t actually going to try and _woo_ one of the Lions, was he?  He didn’t even know which one the print belonged to!  She had expected him to act like a rational person in the face of this news and have a moral crisis upon finding out his soulmate was a felon, not immediately start making a twelve step plan to romance said felon.  Perhaps she expected too much.

“Dates!” Lance said, despairingly.  They were suddenly on the same emotional level, but for vastly different reasons, and Pidge wanted to scream.  “What kind of dates do you go on when your soulmate is one of the Lions?”

If only she could say without a guilty conscience that she had no idea.  Pidge sighed, scrubbing the bridge of her nose so roughly that she knocked her glasses right off.  She didn’t bother to pick them up again.  She needed him as far away from this as humanly possible.  She would send Lance on an all-expenses-paid vacation to visit Hunk’s family in Samoa if that would do it, though she knew in her heart it wouldn’t.  The best she could do was to lay this down in small, easily google-able words.

“Lance, I don’t think you understand.  You _don’t_ date a Lion.  If you’re ever connected to them, you will be _interrogated_.  If your soulprint is ever matched to their fingerprints, you will automatically get added to the FBI’s most wanted list, because the soulmate of a wanted criminal is considered complicit in every crime they commit.  There’s a reason it’s Bonnie AND Clyde, Lance.”

He brushed right past like the idea of life in prison was some pesky cobwebs.  “Okay, but that’s kinda antiquated, isn’t it?  Like, I’m my own person.  When’s the last time somebody’s soulmate was arrested for a crime they didn’t actually commit?”

“Last week,” she deadpanned.  “Maybe more recently because I don’t keep up with every arrest in the state, but there was definitely one last week.”

“Oh.”  There was a moment of mutually-guilty silence as Lance seemed to ponder the situation and Pidge allowed herself to feel weary down to her bones.  Finally, in a meek voice, he asked, “What do you think I should do?”

Pidge sighed.  Again.  “Honestly?  Nothing.  Don’t do a single thing.  Forget about it—act as normally as you can and pretend you don’t know a thing about it.  Never mention the Lions again, especially not to me.  Never express interest in any Lion news stories.  In fact, maybe get in the habit of NOT calling people and talking about criminal activity like you’re discussing your neighbor’s affair over tea and biscuits, _do you think you could do that_?!”

Holy shit, raising her voice felt good.  So did the sound of Lance swallowing into the receiver.  “Noted,” he said.  “But like… then what?  I’m going to meet her one day!  I can’t just pretend that I _didn’t_ meet my soulmate!”

All that coffee was beginning to boil at the back of her throat.  May he have the worst hangover of his life, and may it hit him all at once while he’s cooking breakfast.  “I wasn’t done!” she snapped.  “You act normally right up until the moment your soulprint actuates, and then you _run for the fucking hills_.”

A pause, a rush of air in the mic.  She could hear him sitting upright in bed, scrubbing a hand down his unshaven face.  “Right.  Right, right, right, right.  Just… take it a day at a time.”

“Yeah.”  Pidge leaned back, adding a tap on Lance’s phone to her list of things to do.

“And wait for the shit to hit the fan.”

“Basically.”  Finally, he seemed to be getting it.

“And THEN freak out?”

“Sure, let’s go with that.”  It was fine.  It was all fine.  She crossed her fingers for one long moment, waiting for his final verdict.

He delivered it with what she could only assume was a pout, judging by his meek tone.  “Okay.  Okay.  I can do that.”

 _Praise the heavens_ , she thought, ending the call before he could dump anything else in her lap.  A moment later she finally gave in and threw her phone across the room.  She stared morosely at her un-slept-on couch.  Her life was going to be hellish for a few days until she could make sure that nothing came of her lapse with the print, but at least she wouldn’t have to worry about Lance doing anything more idiotic than his normal, everyday idiocy.

She was proven wrong not three hours later, when she got another call.

Now at her desk at work, navigating to each key of her keyboard through a forest of open containers of coffee and redbull, she was debating the pros and cons of ditching this identity.  It had served her well—the vantage point from inside the FBI was a good one, and she’d managed to stick with it for nearly two years, but alas, it might be time to let go.  She was moving on autopilot when she raised the phone to her ear, still immersed in data feeds and algorithms.

“Do you really think a girl would get into bank robbing?”

What.  

“What?”  Was he serious?  They just went over the Bonnie and Clyde thing that morning!  Why was it that every time Lance spoke she had the urge to chuck a shot of vodka into one of her espressos and chug the whole thing?  The man was giving her the mind-altering-substance version of a deathwish.

Some of it might have been her headache talking, but in her defense, his babble really wasn’t helping.  Apparently, he’d done the exact opposite of every _firm suggestion_ she’d made that morning and was now watching old news coverage of Lion robberies on youtube as he waited for his shift to start.  To the FBI’s constant pissiness, the robberies tended to be very public affairs.  More than once they had been televised live and in-progress, and if you entered the right keywords into google, you could watch the Bank of America heist from three different angles.

“This shit is wild!” Lance was saying, and it was lucky that Pidge’s phone was as secure as a cellular device could be or else his stupidity would have them both arrested by lunchtime.

She told him so.

“Oh.”  He took a pause, probably the first he’d taken since waking up this morning.  “Okay, so… should I hang up?  Not gonna lie, I really need to talk to someone about this.  I think I’m about to explode.  Allura keeps looking at me funny, I’m pretty sure she’s on to me here.”

Pidge massaged her cheeks, noting the fact that her entire body felt slightly numb.  That was probably a result of the caffeine.  To hell with it—her phone was just about untraceable and she had access to every state-and-country-wide surveillance system that could possibly record them.  She set up a new system scan, this one on the lookout for any pings on Lance’s name, phone, SSN, file, location, and anything else she could think of.  Her lab mates and their manager were all out in the field right now, sending her data packets to unravel—she still had another half an hour to exist without supervision.  Against her better judgement, she let him talk. 

He settled in like a gossipy old lady with her knitting, voice low and excited.  Judging by the sounds of traffic, he was perched on the wall of the ice cream joint just down the road from ambulance dispatch, probably with his phone in one hand and a crappy dime store soulmate novel in the other.  At least he was clear-headed enough to go somewhere with a lot of noise.  “So… which one do you think it is?  You’ve worked on their case—you must know something about their personalities by now, right?  Which one fits me better?”

This was a trick.  Pidge could smell it immediately.  “I’m not going to give you more information from their confidential government file,” she scoffed.  She’d learned her lesson about _that_ , thank you very much.

“Oh, come on!  I’m trying to figure out who my _soulmate_ is, Pidge!  Can’t you have mercy on my aching heart?  Just like… pass me the file on the DL.”  If eyebrows could make noise, his would be squeaking as he wriggled them animatedly.  

Pidge growled.  “ _No_.”

“Fine.  I’ll do it all myself.”  There was a pause as more video played in the background, and he hummed thoughtfully.  “Okay, well, the taller one is super buff.  Not many girls have shoulders like that.”

He was going to be the death of her.  “Lance.”

“But the smaller one?  Those hips are SWEET.  I bet under that mask she’s got the prettiest figure you ever did see.”

Would it be a pleasant death?  Perhaps.  Anything had to be better than being trapped on this mortal plane.  “Lance, I’m only going to tell you this once.”

“Yeah?” he asked, eager.  “What juicy info do you have on them?  Lay it on me, I’m ready.”

He was so damn eager about it.  That was why she couldn’t help the small and vicious sense of satisfaction that bubbled up when she said, “Stop _thinking about it_!  And also, _also_!  Stop assuming things, you prick!”

It only paused him for a moment.  “Does that mean one of them _is_ a girl or—?”

With a warning to keep his nose clean, she hung up on him for the second time today.  Just in time, too—Director Iverson leaned around the door right at that moment, his one eye glaring a hole into the hand that was hiding her phone until she gave a sheepish smile and promised to stow it in her locker.  Her record was (cough) clean, but Iverson was the kind of person who didn’t seem to trust a single soul.  “See that you do that, Mr. Gunderson,” he said, slow and meaningful with an emphasis on the military diction, and she let the smile slip from her face as soon as he backed out the door.  Damn FBI director.  What an asshole.

…It wasn’t until everyone was back in the analyst office and she was buried up to her forehead in DNA samples that she realized that there was one teeny-weeny little thing she forgot to do: call the window washer.  Somewhere between feeding enough alcohol to Lance to preserve a cadaver and her morning spent contemplating how to shut down the National Print Database, it completely slipped her mind.  Her bones froze solid as she stared, unseeing, at her computer screen.  T-60 minutes until sunset, when the break-in was scheduled to begin, and she was just now realizing that she forgot to ring up their undercover shield installer to _install their shields_.  Fuck.  Fuckity fuck.  Fuckzilla VS. Megalo _damnit_.

She also didn’t send a coded confirmation text, though, so maybe they realized it was a no-go.  God, she hoped so.  She’d never forgotten something this important before.  Missing a print was one thing—she probably just mishandled a semicolon in her code, which was serious but fixable.  This?  This was like forgetting to give your eighty-year-old grandpa his heart medication.

Forty-five white-knuckled minutes later, she managed to wriggle free of her office-mates to get to her phone, scrambling to send an abort command.  The calls went straight to voicemail, the texts bounced.  She held her breath to the count of ten of her favorite curses.  They must have ditched the burners already.  That meant the only way to contact them was on their mask-comms—they wouldn’t have anything that was remotely traceable until they made it to the Marmora base afterward.  The masks were extreme short range, not meant for anything but communicating with each other inside a building.  If she were closer she could boost her signal, but from here she could be a frog slapping at a computer for all the good she’d do.

It was happening; they were really, actually doing it.  Oh god, they were _breaking into the Eastern Unilu Bank in ten minutes without the cover of their shields_.

Honestly, what the hell?  What kind of morons just ASSUMED she managed her part of the preparation without a confirmation?  That was the first thing the Blade of Marmora taught their recruits: always be certain, take no risk.  But then again, they weren’t strictly Marmora agents—they didn’t always adhere to the No Risk policy that Kolivan used like a prayer.   _I can’t just sit here and do nothing_ , Keith’s voice rang in her ears.  The stupid impulsive _asshole_.  He was worse than Lance!

Two more curse words later and she was sitting in a stall in the bathroom, trying to do some controlled breathing exercises.

So, she forgot the shields.  She couldn’t contact her team directly, she didn’t have time to decrypt the latest Marmora communication line to have them intervene, and unless she wanted suspicion to come down on her she couldn’t leave the FBI building until she was told to.  If the beginning of the break-in was going according to plan, they probably just took out the bank’s phone lines, seeing as one of the major holes at the EUB was the fact that during the daily blackout they had their security systems draw power only from the phone lines and several small backup generators.

Right now, the lights inside the building would be going out in accordance with city-wide dark hours.  The EUB took it a step further—they turned off power to the entire building, a marketing ploy to ‘seem green’, which was the reason their security systems had to run on alternative sources of electricity.  This was intel that the Blade of Marmora gave them, the reason the EUB was their next target; it was a combination of that exploitable quirk and the fact that Ellisa Prorok kept a safe-deposit box there that presumably held valuable records of her business with Zarkon, in addition to a good chunk of her personal wealth.

Pidge’s head was pounding.  Shields.  That was the next step, assuming Keith managed to disconnect the phone lines.  The backup generators would kick in, and the shields would supposedly siphon away some of that power and come live.  What did the shields do?  They fucked the SWAT teams right the fuck up, that was what, because they were incredibly life-like digital holographic projections—there was literally no way to tell that a shield projection was fake from further than ten feet away.  The FBI didn’t realize that their eyes on the outside were completely fooled.  It was standard procedure for the Lions by now—install cloaking hardware, commit heist, get out, let Pidge enter with the forensics team, clean evidence instead of storing it in the FBI database, deinstall hardware the next day.  Efficient, swift, and the only trail it left to follow was hard as fuck to find unless you knew where to look for it.

The heist itself consisted of physically disabling the rest of the security system, using a virus to hack into the vault, and cleaning out the safe deposit box.  From the moment they entered, they would rely on the shields to cover them.  If the shields were down, and the police somehow got tipped off to the invasion—which they would, sooner rather than later, because even Shiro couldn’t disable every alarm before one of them triggered—they would have no cover.  No emergency catwalks, either—those also relied on shields.  How far could they get into the building before one of the nearby security systems caught onto them?  Probably not far.  They were probably already inside, and if her calculations were correct—

Her pager went off.   _BL 10-65, A1_

In the sincerest manner possible, _fuck_.  That was the SWAT code for the Black Lions.  They’d be dispatched within the next three minutes, followed by emergency response vehicles (Lance was on duty, Lance was going to get sent out, this was the exact opposite of keeping Lance out of the way), containment, forensics, and finally cleanup.  Her team was already in trouble—and the only way she wasn’t going to blow her cover _if it hadn’t yet been blown_ was to do her job to catch them.

 

* * *

 

 

Many people claim that just before their lives took a turn for the worse, they got a feeling that something terrible was on the horizon.  A change in the wind, an omen in a cereal box.  A warning. 

Shiro was not one of those people.  Shiro had _no idea_ there was an impending disaster until the moment ‘impending’ turned to ‘imminent’ turned to ‘immediate’ in the form of a spray of bullets shattering a row of windows just down the hallway from where he was running, boots digging into the carpet, his mask hot and sticky on his face.

Maybe this was a karmic thing.  They say that if you did enough bad deeds in your last life, the bad karma would follow you beyond death itself in order to dog your heels, a mythical force of comeuppance designed to make you miserable in some sort of cosmic punishment.  Shiro usually tried not to feel like he _deserved_ all the bad luck in his life, but at some point you had to sit back and admit that there was a pattern.  Like getting on the bad side of crime lord after mob boss who forced you into a life of theft that you were desperately trying to right, which only served to push you farther and farther into bad situations.  Like now.

“Dagger!” Shiro barked.  He only hoped that the police hadn’t managed to deadspot the building yet.  The last thing they needed right now was to get separated on opposite sides of dead air with no way to communicate an emergency escape plan.  He felt weak with relief when he got a grunt in his ear just as he swung around to the open elevator shaft.  “Okay, here’s my idea—we take the east hallway on the thirteenth floor and—”

“Gotta cut you off there,” his partner snarled.  Shiro didn’t take offense to it—Keith got snarly every time he got focused, like clockwork.  There didn’t exist another person as reliable with his emotions as Keith Kogane.  Shiro would know, they’d been friends for half a lifetime now.  He waited while Keith took cover, the pings of ricochets echoing in his ear until Keith said, “There’s something wrong with the windows.  The shields might be malfunctioning.  Don’t know how many are down.”

Shiro swore.  How many windows did they install for this job?  He had the whole thing memorized this morning, but somehow it was hard to think back on his marked-up blueprint when he was busy counting the gunshots.  They were going off in thirteen shot clusters, taking out one hallway then another, likely trying to scare them into moving into plain view again.  They didn’t sound like lethal rounds, but tranq darts fast enough to punch through windows like that could puncture a vital organ if they hit wrong.  

The building’s internal sensors were definitely down, but if Keith was right, then the view inside through the glass-plated sides of the skyscraper was unobstructed.  The only good news was that there were no laser weapons in the fray—that meant no active sentries, no one in the building with them yet.  It was only a matter of time.

“In that case, I think we’re heading to the roof,” Shiro said, and jammed his prosthetic hand into the magnetic cuff on his belt.  The magnet lit up instantly, dragging itself to the elevator track on the wall of the shaft.  With a flick of his thumb, the magnet began to glide up, taking him with it with a grace he’d learned only after many a banged knee.

“What?  No way!  I haven’t even gotten to the safe—”

“Dagger.  We’re compromised.  You can’t—”

“No, this is stupid, I’m not leaving yet.  The stormtroopers aren’t coming in for another two minutes at least, I have time—”

They didn’t have time for Shiro to fully contemplate the reference, so he instead settled on mild regret.  Was it fair to regret making Keith watch Star Wars?  No, probably not, but calling the SWAT team ‘stormtroopers’ felt a little too on the nose.  Keith wasn’t the best with subtlety.  Shiro tried not to groan.  He was not letting this go, but he couldn’t argue with the guy right now.  They didn’t have the luxury to work around his mission headspace, not when time was only ticking faster.  “Don’t get fucking shot,” he growled, and threw himself at one of the elevator doors near the fiftieth floor, sticking to it with ease.  Thank god for his harness.  He pried the doors open and rolled into the hallway, keeping low but fast.

In order to get out of here, they each had one objective to complete.  Keith, the dagger, was on one of the lower floors, ready to burst into the ballroom-sized safe room and ‘clean it out’.  Shiro, the key, first had to take down enough of the secondary inner security system that his partner could even get close.

He was closing in on the mainframe when a new voice crackled in his ear, distorted by the external jammers.  “Ke—?  C—on I re—eed to—"

“Grid?  Is that you?”

She groaned, sliced up by interference, before she managed to bypass the jammers from the outside.  “There we go,” she muttered, and then, “You guys need to get out of there.”

“I’m working on it,” he said, shoving his hand through a panel on the side of the computer that he’d just pried off.  Text began to light up the inside of his mask.  “Dagger is down at the—”

“Dagger is on their way up.  Feds are inside.  Key, I screwed up.  Like, really screwed up.  I’ll explain later, you need to get to open air.  Keep away from the windows— _all_ the windows.  Move fast.  They’re about to gas the building.”

Of course they were.  Listening hard, Shiro could just hear the tell-tale sound of balloon corks inflating in the frames of broken windows a few floors below.  He waited twenty more seconds for the last of the first virus to download—unless someone completely reinstalled the system it would sit there waiting for it’s trigger, so maybe they could come back and finish this godforsaken job at some point—and then pulled back, tightening the straps of his mask.  Depending on which gas combination was about to be pumped through the ventilation system, they would have somewhere between two and eight minutes of protection.  Gas masks weren’t just for the aesthetic, though the Lions’ parent organization sure appreciated the look.

Shiro couldn’t help but smile—he could imagine Keith, all decked out in his complete Marmora suit, grinning beneath his mask as he parkoured his way up the building.  For some reason that Shiro would never understand, the guy loved it when they were racing against the gas.  Something about the extra thrill of it, probably—Keith was an adrenaline junkie at heart.  He lived on the edge.  Always had, for as long as Shiro had known him.

With that, Shiro took off.

“Dagger, ETA!” he called when he was back in the elevator.  A warning was strobing in his peripheral vision, letting him know that there were irritants in the air.  He was sure the lower levels were already unpassable without a mask.

“Don’t know.  I’m in the ventilation shaft on thirty-two.”

“What?” Shiro asked sharply.  “Why?!”

“Sentries,” Keith said gruffly, and there was the sound of him forcing his way through a small opening.  Hopefully he was moving away from central airflow—if he succumbed to the gas in a vent shaft, there was no way that Shiro could get him out before they were both cornered.  Fantastic.

Of all the ways for an operation to go belly up, this was actually the one Shiro had least expected.  Had he and Keith run into extra security before?  Several times.  Had they once misjudged a powerline and accidentally gotten the shock of their lives?  His replacement prosthesis could vouch for that one.  But the _shields_?  The shields were a Marmora specialty, something that they’d been on the cutting-edge of for fifty years or more.  They didn’t just _fail_.

“Grid,” Shiro grunted, finally hitting the top floor of the skyscraper.  He glanced around, arm up and ready for attack, but it seemed the sentries on this level weren’t active yet.  The time they spent tampering with the system must still be helping more than hindering, though the fact that the feds had the gas chambers running only served as a reminder that the rest of security would follow.  

Katie hummed.  

“Are you advising or just warning?”

“The second.”

That meant the FBI already had forensics crews waiting.  She was somewhere on the street, sitting with her crew until she was given the go-ahead to enter.  The block would be cordoned off by now, the roads packed with various personnel waiting to do their jobs in the wake of the ‘stormtroopers’ who were undoubtedly already working their way up from the basement.  Ambulances and firetrucks, media vans that were trying to sneak their way in, local police working to keep bystanders out of the way, maybe even Zarkon special security and choppers… all of them standing between the Black Lions and freedom.  A thousand peeping eyes, watching for any flicker of movement, ready to close in.

Shiro closed his own eyes, leaning against the roof-access door.  He couldn’t hear choppers yet, but they would be coming.  From the schematics of the building, they probably wouldn’t be able to land on the roof, but they could still circle.  Keith panted in his ear, breath getting harsher second by second.  Less than a minute away from passing the hell out, if the sound was anything to go by, but Keith had a tendency to surprise people with his endurance.  “In the elevator,” Keith gasped a moment later.

Deep breath in.  Deep breath out.  Shiro himself was starting to feel the effects of the gas, the filters on his mask struggling to keep his air clean.  They were pretty high tech—anything with Katie’s signature tended to be—but still, they were built with versatility in mind.  The masks could stand up to just about anything, just not for very long.  Extended filtration systems had to be cut out of this iteration to make room for anti-recognition hardware.

Did this seem like a design flaw?  Well, it kind of did _now_.  It did not, however, stop him from grabbing hold of Keith two unsteady steps from the elevator, hefting him over a shoulder despite several loud protests and a slight wave of wooziness, and forcing open the door to the roof.

“It’s okay,” Shiro said, as Keith clutched at the back of his coat with shaking hands.  They were coming up to the very edge of the roof, on the opposite side of the building from the big-ass armored trucks that his visor was flipping its lid about.  “If you feel dizzy just close your eyes, okay?”

Keith slurred something about shields as Shiro took the necessary inhale to buff up his resolve.  He glanced over the ledge—saw the pink, cocoon-like inflatable reaching the fiftieth floor that was plugging up the holes in the side of the building.  The wind up here was fierce, nearly knocking back his hood from it’s magnetic clasps.  He patted Keith reassuringly on the back.  Then, like a scene out of an old Indiana Jones movie, he stepped out with one foot into what looked like thin air.

On the day of every heist, three separate events always occurred.  One, Keith woke up at four in the morning and spent three hours cleaning his knife despite Shiro hypocritically nagging him to get a good night’s rest.  Two, Shiro let Keith nap (he had a soft spot, what could he say) as he and Kolivan loaded up their equipment and triple-checked everything.  And three, Katie called Regris, a window washer who also specialized in the installation of external holographic cloaking devices, so that he could set up the gadgets known as ‘shields’—penny-sized projectors that created a holographic scene to cover up whatever was really happening inside, say, the Eastern Unilu Bank.

It wasn’t until his foot dipped into empty air that was actually empty, causing his gut to lurch and Keith to sway dangerously on his shoulders, that Shiro realized just what Katie meant when she said to stay away from _all the windows_.  Regris was also their installer of invisible catwalks—not fun, but certainly better than falling to your death from the top of a high rise.  The drop in front of him was far enough to seem surreal.  Sweat broke out on his forehead.  He slipped his foot back onto solid concrete, shuffling backwards until he could no longer see the specks of headlights a hundred stories down.

He was going to be dreaming about this tonight.  He could already feel it growing like a fungus into his subconscious.  

“Grid,” he said, and miraculously his voice wasn’t shaking.  He held Keith tighter just to make sure there was absolutely no way that he could slip from his grip, ducking down beside a water tank to keep out of sight of the choppers he knew were getting close.  He looked around frantically, cataloguing everything within his sight as he tried to think of something to do.  Water tank and filtration, ventilation and elevator pulley room, several rows of solar panels and a small but efficient garden with some benches, paneling that might lead into a crawlspace…

“Key,” came Katie’s worried voice, a second delayed.  She was down there in the midst of all the government agents, she couldn’t risk helping them more than she already had, but still he had to ask.

“Is there a particular reason that we have no escape from the roof?”

He could almost see the nervous twitch of her slim white finger on the bridge of her glasses.  He imagined her sitting in one of the vans far below, one side of her headset tuned in to the FBI chatter and the other synced up to their mask-comms, her small hands flitting across her keyboard as she clicked across blueprints.  “No?” she said, her voice betraying her by turning it into a question.  The next words were a whisper.  “I’m so sorry,” she said, and she sounded so much younger than she really was—young and scared.

If Keith was awake, Shiro would have made one last joke about always wanting to get trapped like an animal on the roof of a hundred-story high rise, just to lighten the mood.  With only Katie in his ear, he figured the least he could be was honest.  “We might not be able to get out of this, but I’m going to do everything I can,” he promised, laying Keith down on his side to start pulling supplies out of the pouches on his semi-conscious companion’s belt.  It was a good thing that Keith only had two emotional states, _causing disaster_ and _preparing for disaster_ , because otherwise the half-assed plan he was concocting wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting them back to solid ground.  He found everything he needed in seconds.  Keith groaned, pawing at his mask with uncoordinated fingers—Shiro batted them away, pulling the straps more snuggly against his head and tucking his hood back over his hair.  He murmured a quick apology to his friend, stood, and strode back to the edge of the roof.   

The silence from both the grid and the dagger cemented like a stone in his stomach.  He was the last one standing right now.  Was he going to live up to his code name?  He sure hoped so.  This would either work, or… well.

 

* * *

 

Pidge switched all of her attention back to FBI chatter just in time to hear them reach the roof.  Target one on adjacent roof, on foot—target two, whereabouts unknown—copters to land on adjacent building and apprehend target one.  Shiro was… running.  Something he never did.  It must have been dire up there if he had to leave Keith behind.  She waited for the SWAT team to find Keith—for them to catch Shiro.  She was just starting to hope that Shiro got away when there was a building rattling BOOM and a sharp flash of light in the video feed she was looking at, on the far side of the building.

She paused the feed and reversed it, watching the size and shape of the explosion.  A grenade?  _Keith’s emergency grenade_?  What the hell did Shiro _do_?

Screams outside.  A moment of panic as debris fell—but no one was directly underneath, so even as the police on the ground began moving vehicles away from the potential fall radius, Iverson turned his attention back to the SWAT team, as did Pidge.  Their voices were muddled for a hot second, all of them ducking for cover, until the call for a count-off.  One, two, three… seven, eight, nine.  And then, right there under their noses, at the end of the line—she grinned.  It was Shiro’s voice, imitating Agent Harris.  She could only tell because of the way he clicked his radio on and off twice at the start of his check-in, a code for her and her alone.  He must have set up Keith’s stolen ‘just in case’ shield as a diversion to convince the SWAT team he got away and left Keith behind, when in reality they’re both right there.  Once the bait was set, the grenade went off, taking out the shield—and making it seem as if they lost Shiro in the chaos, giving him the opening he needed to take out one of the SWAT guys and steal his getup.

How the hell could she have doubted him?  Shiro was a tactical genius, but more than that… he was a survivor, and he didn’t leave people behind.  He would fight until there wasn’t any fight left to have.

“Target spotted,” Shiro’s disguised voice said, barking a location and description.  Keith was partially hidden near the rooftop water tank, lying on his side and apparently unconscious.  Pidge flicked on his mask-comm, listening to his breathing—it didn’t sound like he was faking.  The gas, a relatively new fentanyl derivative, must have gotten him.  She listened until Shiro, patting him down and cuffing him, got to the mask and pulled it off.  He stood guard over Keith, going silent as the rest of the team continued to sweep the space.

Pidge took advantage of the quiet, connecting to his comm and switching it to a secure channel.  She kept an ear on the rest of the chatter as she signaled to him—on and off three times, a staticy S in morse code to go with his I, letting him know that the line was secure.

“Grid,” he said.  His voice hardly sounded strained at all, which was a miracle considering everything that was going on.

“Key,” she responded.  She wished she could say the same for herself, but no such luck.  Her jitters were reaching myoclonic levels, and her brain was starting to hyper-analyze _everything_.

Shiro breathed out.  “I’m about to do something stupid to get us out of here before they discover SWAT 10’s body in the crawlspace.”  He paused.  “Also, do not attempt to contact the Key comm.  I tossed my mask onto the other roof.”

“Understood.”

“We’re going to need an ambulance.”

“Immediately?”

“Within an hour.”

She tried not to sigh.  This was her mess—every bad decision they made while trying to get out was on her.  She’d just have to deal with the consequences as they came.  “Got it.  Signal again when safe.”

With another three bursts of static, she let him know that the line was no longer secure.

She was lucky that most of the forensics team was outside of the van, rubbernecking at the helicopters with binoculars from behind the weapon-proof blockade half a block down from the bank.  The moment the grenade went off, everyone was moved back to a safe distance, making room for the bomb-squad.  They were the only personnel with permission to approach the building now besides SWAT, until it was cleared of theoretical explosives.  The mandatory quiet hours, ie ‘lights-out pockets’, were still in effect so there was no one else nearby to evacuate.  Pidge had a moment to breathe, in which she decided to contemplate what her next move should be.  She needed to divine a plausible plan to attend to whatever medical emergency Shiro was about to cause.

Option one:

Not tell Lance.  Wait for Shiro and Keith to be transported out of the building with the bomb squad and picked up by Lance and Allura’s ambulance.  Have Marmora agents intercept the ambulance, get the Lions out of there, and possibly traumatize Lance and Allura in the process.  Hope that Keith got enough medical attention to get from there to the Marmora base without dying like a loser.

Option two:

Not tell Lance.  Wait for Shiro and Keith to be transported out of the building with the bomb squad and picked up by Lance and Allura’s ambulance.  Trust that even though he would at first be inclined to let the law take its course, Lance—soft-hearted and sappy romantic that he was—would eventually, all on his own, come up with a plan to get Keith out of there and inevitably demand Pidge’s help.  If she had him pegged, and she did, he would be easily convinced that he was in charge.  Subtly manipulate Lance into letting the Marmora agents take the Lions.

Or, option three:

 _Tell Lance_.  Wait for Shiro and Keith to be transported out of the building with the bomb squad and picked up by Lance and Allura’s ambulance.  Come clean to Lance, somehow convince Lance to work with them (easy-peezy, considering the conversations she’s had with the idiot today), and devise Marmora pickup from there.  Deal with fallout when Lance began to fully realize the scope of the situation.

She wondered if he ever thought about being a bartender—she’d been crafting a bartending alias for a while now, and it wouldn’t require too many tweaks to gift it to him.  The poor guy was probably going to lose his entire mind when he learned that not only was his soulmate criminally inclined, but so was the FBI agent bar-buddy who accidentally led him to said soulmate.  She didn’t envy him that.  Though dealing with a hysterical Lance on top of an injured Keith, a helicoptering Shiro, and still trying to keep the law off their backs… that was just asking for trouble. 

One, two, or three.  She mentally clicked through the options, keeping an ear on the chatter.  She had until the Lions were in the ambulance to pick one, assuming Shiro could get them out of the building.  But which one would have the best outcome?  The smallest chance of failure?  Lance’s life could easily be ruined in any of these scenarios.  The dude would hold up under FBI interrogation about as well as wet tissue, but it wasn’t like she had any option but to involve him one way or another.  Hell, it would be a whole lot easier to think this out if she wasn’t running on leftover adrenaline and six gallons of caffeinated liquids.  What she wouldn’t do to have a die to roll.

In her periphery, Shiro called for a medical evac.  She had no idea what he did, but Keith was now seizing.  The bomb squad was on the sixtieth floor—a team of them split off to focus on making sure the building exits and staircases were safe to transport Keith down.  It was efficient, more efficient than Shiro or Keith could usually manage on their own.  They would arrive on the roof with a stretcher within minutes.

Pidge scrunched her face up, glancing over at her phone like it might inspire her to solve this conundrum.  Ouch, seventy-four new messages?  She’d known Lance to quadruple-text, but this was intense even for him.  She chanced opening the messaging app and was greeted by a solid wall of blubbering.  As she watched, more appeared, her phone scrolling automatically to the most recent.

_I’m about to pee my pants_

_What do I do if she’s the one??_

_Man you gotta help me out here or I’m just going to throw up all over the gurney I’m still way too hungover for this_

_Oh god, the bomb squad wants us to suit up_

_Pidge_

_Pidge please_

_I’m actually about to start crying_

A laugh nearly surged past her lips.  Twenty-some odd hours had given them both some very serious hairpin turns.  Soulmates, soulprints, fingerprints… ‘ _same, buddy_ ’ was the response that came to mind.  She could go for some crying right about now, too.  Offering reassurance was a daunting task, something cosmic and grave, the gravity of which was likely to crush her at any moment now.  At this point, she was half convinced that every awful thing that had happened in the last solar day would materialize on the physical plane in one awful, spinning, gravitational deathtrap, creating a black hole in the middle of Seventh Avenue that would swallow them all up.

She sent the only remotely reassuring thing that came to mind.   _You got this._  He definitely did not have it, if the string of keysmashes and crying-emojis were anything to go by.

Feeling like she was coming apart at the molecular level, Pidge exited the forensics van to join her coworkers.  She wondered if she could pass off her shakes as over-caffeination.  Probably.  Everybody knew she was addicted to Redbull.  She took the binoculars that they passed over and focused them at the back of the ambulance.  Lance wasn’t throwing up, at least—he was letting a bomb-squad guy strap a ballistic vest over his paramedic uniform.  Allura got the same treatment next to him.  Pidge should have told him to ask for some gloves.  Padded bomb retrieval gloves were thick enough that they exceeded the maximum distance that soulmate actuation could trigger at.  Just last month Pidge read a study on Print actuation—marks could actuate at a distance of 0.5 millimeters or less, even through glass, steel, and clay.  If Lance got too close to his soulmate, everybody in the vicinity would be tipped off and there would be no more options that could possibly offer enough wriggle room to get them out of this.  

Pidge blinked and suddenly the paramedics were waiting at the bottom of the front steps, gurney between them.  She refocused on her headset—the group with Keith was nearly to the bottom floor.  One last time, she calculated every variable she could think of.  Lance, Shiro, the copters, the armored FBI vehicle, the ambulances, the firetruck, the media presence and live cameras, the SWAT team, the bomb squad, the as-yet-undiscovered unconscious body of Agent Harris, the containment crew, the forensics van, the destroyed shield Shiro used to make it seem like he fled across the rooftops, the bomb threat still in effect, the Lion mask on the next roof over, the Marmora van waiting to be signaled for a pick-up, Keith and his convulsions, the gassed building, two burner phones in an incinerator on 2nd Street, the soulprint on the back of Lance’s neck, the biological processes of actuation…

…and herself, standing a hundred meters away, on the other side of the blockade.

While she watched Keith get loaded into the ambulance, all four limbs cuffed and hogtied, Allura working to strap his limp body down as Lance pushed the gurney, she made her decision.

This would be mistake number seven, but who was counting?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay, folks! Hope you enjoy! The next chapter should be coming sooner than 8 months from now!


	3. When You Have an Ambulance, You're Going to Need an Escape Plan

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The last of Pidge's no good, very long night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks again to @anamorph-marco (anamorph_marco on AO3) for beta-ing!

September 8th, 20XX

“Internal investigation was the fad of the summer—and now, on our way into fall, the trend of corporations and bureaus examining employee conduct continues.  This week, the big name under fire is the Altea Ambulance Service.  After news came to light of a paramedic whose soulmate currently resides in supermax, questions began to surface about the ‘partner-in-crime’ laws and policies about soulprint registry.  In accordance with statute 84, the soulmate of a wanted criminal will be added to the PIC registry and can be detained by police or arrested concurrently with said criminal _as long as_ there is reason to believe that the soulmates are on good terms.  Now, ‘good terms’ is a highly subjective stance, which carries different weights depending on the severity of the crime and which judge happens to be presiding.  If a judge says you’re good to go, then you’re good to go!  A soulmate can only be held until acquitted in a court of law—after they are released from the judicial process, they cannot be detained again, pending their compliance with ceasement of all communication with their soulmate until an allotted time has passed.

“The issue in a case such as this is that the soulmate of the prisoner has not yet faced a judge or jury.  He has not been arrested or detained at all, despite the notoriety of his criminal partner and the severity of the crimes in question—he is still, for all intents and purposes, a free man.  But all the same, his employer retains the right to terminate his contract, retroactively invalidate any cases he assisted on, and even revoke his paramedical license.  Is this a valid safety measure, especially for medical companies who must strive for the highest standard of patient care and safety?  Or is this discrimination against a free man?  Let’s take some callers to see what Altea thinks.”

Allura Leona wasn’t known to trust in fate.  Oh, she wasn’t a soulmate skeptic, no!  She was well read and with the kind of evidence provided there was no reason _not_ to believe that there was someone or possibly someones out there who would feel _right_ under the caress of her fingers.  She just wasn’t sure if the whole idea of ‘perfect matches’ or the ‘one true pairing’ was accurate.  Really, if every person on this earth was supposed to be matched with one individual who completed them, what were the odds of 90% of soulprint actuations happening before the age of thirty?  It just seemed a little farfetched that out of nine billion people _that one_ would wind up close enough to touch so casually.  More likely, fate just chose the best option out of everyone you came into contact with.  And if all your options were dismal, then who was to say your supposed soulmate wasn’t actually that great?

This was something she thought about a lot in the days after the failed Unilu heist, when she was sitting for hours in the FBI headquarters sipping tepid coffee that young, eager interns kept bringing her.  She kept her statement simple and to the point—she and her partner, Lance, loaded the Lion into the ambulance, taking care to secure him properly.  He was in some pretty severe cuffs—neither of them attempted to remove them.  Once inside the vehicle, she allowed the SWAT officer into the back with her and closed the doors.  Lance entered the drivers compartment from outside and they left the premises.  She didn’t speak to the Lion or the SWAT officer except to declare the medical care she was administering, starting with a preliminary vitals check.  The Lion began seizing again as she was cutting open the top of his bodysuit.  She rolled him on his side, recovery position.  After three minutes, his oxygen levels got dangerously low, and she administered the standard anti-convulsant, keeping an eye on his vitals.  He was still unconscious but in stable condition when they reached the hospital.  She and Lance transferred him into the care of Balmera staff, and the SWAT officer accompanied him.

And… that was it.  That, and that alone, was her story.  She’d decided early on that no one had to know about the complete and utter panic that Lance had worked himself into, nor did they need to know how the soulful eyes of the man in the riot gear watched her the entire time she was caring for the unconscious Lion in her transport.  Lance’s texts were going in a drawer in her mind labeled ‘never open again’.  The whole thing was a mess, and though she didn’t know whose fault it really was, she did know that it all began that afternoon, when Lance came up to her with two melting ice cream cones and an invitation to watch the footage of the Black Lions’ Bank of America heist.

* * *

So, Pidge got Lance involved with the Lions.  Well, more accurately—he got himself involved with the Lions.  She’ll never forget the panicked phone call that she received the moment the ambulance pulled away from the bank.  She had just pulled up Shiro’s comm link, ready to tell him to break his cover to the paramedics while she hailed the Marmora transport, when Lance beat her to the punch.  The situation was almost funny—Lance behind the wheel, his phone already on speaker, blurting a bundle of words that amounted to, “I’m the maybe soulmate!” and then retreating back to the other side of the partition to regret everything.  He started whispering as soon as he realized she was listening, words tumbling out so fast it sounded like he was hyperventilating.  Something about how everyone knew the secret now (they didn’t, he really needed to work on enunciation), and he was going to have to call his grandma from prison (because he thought the SWAT guy in the back with Allura was actually a SWAT guy), and then, for some reason (probably the hysteria) he started entertaining the idea of driving to the nearest pier (an hour away) and propelling the whole lot of them into the depths (yikes).

Pidge managed to dissuade him—after she got away from the forensics team claiming she needed a bathroom break _because of_ all that coffee, ha ha ha—by hissing, “Are you _crazy_?  How is murder-suicide the answer?”

He only got worse from there.

“So, it turns out my possible soulmate isn’t a girl?  I’ve never been super into guys before but maybe this is it.  This might be my gay awakening.  Because I’m not gonna lie, everything about this situation is weird as fuck and the worst part is that I think I’m getting a boner.”  He chuckled nervously.  The sirens were only serving to accentuate the waver in his voice.

If Pidge survived the night, she was never, ever going to let him live this down.  But first things first—“You’re not doing anything stupid, are you?  Like actuating your print?”

“What?!   _No_?!  He’s barely conscious!  How could you even think that I, Lance Alexandro Nu—”

She cut off the speech somewhere in the middle of what the noble men of House Alvarez would think of doing something so underhanded.  She needed Lance to work with them, yes, but more importantly she needed a pick-up for Shiro and Keith.  The hospital was only a seven-minute drive from here for christ’s sake.  She really didn’t have all night to hang around coaching everybody through this—there was still FBI chatter in her ear, and soon enough she would be on her way into the building for official forensics analysis.  “I don’t have time for this!  You’re going to get us both in so much trouble—”

“No!  Wait!  Pidge!  Please don’t hang up on me again, you have to tell me what to do!  Is it like, insane to try and break him out of the hospital or—"

Pidge blinked.  She… she hadn’t thought of that.  She was so used to Kolivan’s blank stares and the ‘ _in transit is the weakest point, if you’re to attack anything unplanned do it while it’s moving_ ’ lectures that she’d forgotten that Keith wouldn’t actually be under surveillance at the hospital until Shiro got ousted.  She pinched the bridge of her nose.  How many long hours had she been awake at this point, and how many of those hours had she been intoxicated?  God, she needed a nap.   _Badly_.

Shiro’s cover was intact until they discovered poor Agent Harris, stowed in the crawl space at Unilu.  Lance and Allura would have plausible deniability so long as they did their jobs—aka so long as they provided care and delivered Keith to the hospital with his ‘keeper’.  Hospital security wasn’t anything that Shiro couldn’t handle, they’d just have a few cameras to worry about, and there would be ample time to fix the footage later.  The moment Keith was confirmed to be stable, Shiro could just uncuff him, disguise them, and walk right back out of the building; meanwhile, almost the entire Bureau would still be at the EUB scrambling to figure out how to apprehend him.

Frankly speaking, she felt like an idiot for freaking out so badly just minutes ago.  She had calculated, in rather dramatic detail she might add, how many minutes Lance would last handcuffed to an interrogation table.  That was embarrassing.  Though not as embarrassing as the fact that she was almost certain he would cave within ten minutes.

“Lance, hold that thought,” she murmured, already muting him to pull up Shiro’s comms and initiate the secure channel code.  “Key,” she gasped, breathless.

“Grid.  Thank god, I was getting worried.  What’s the plan?  Can we expect a drive-by soon?” he murmured, voice low under the rattle of medical equipment.

“Right.  So, uh… here’s the thing.  You know how I forgot to do the windows earlier?”

“I… was unaware that you forgot completely.”  His voice was soft, softer than she deserved, as he digested this new information.  “I thought they were malfunctioning,” he muttered, almost to himself.

“Unfortunately, no.”  Pidge sucked in a breath and tore a page out of Lance’s book, blurting the story out in one long run-on sentence.  “I’ve been distracted because I missed a Lion fingerprint in the database and this _guy I know_ had me run a soulprint search on his Print and they um… they matched.”

“Oh…kay…”

She sped up.  She had one eye on her watch, one eye on the door of the bathroom, one ear on Shiro, and one ear on the FBI chatter.  Presumably this was what a Marvel S.H.I.E.L.D agent felt like.  “I was doing damage control and I forgot to do _the thing_ for you, but the funny part is that _the guy_ is the one driving you and even after this entire mess _I really don’t want to ruin his life_.”

A pause.  There was the sound of Shiro leaning toward the front of the ambulance, and a skid that set Pidge’s teeth on edge as she imagined the vehicle taking a corner at speeds that could flatten them all into pancakes.  Then Shiro was back, huffing a laugh.  “He’s jumpy, isn’t he.”

“He thinks you’re capable of shooting him in the back of the head with zero mercy, give him some slack.”  She lowered her voice, even though she was completely alone and audible to no one but Shiro.  “Listen, he’s one of the sweetest people I know and he has no clue which of you is his soulmate.  He still doesn’t know that you’re you, but he had a really good idea about a hospital-break because he wants to help Dagger.  He just has no idea what he’s getting into.”

The plan was starting to formulate.  “So… you want me to reassure him without making it obvious that I am, so that I can take care of Dagger and he can keep his nose clean for now.”

“Uh… yeah, basically.”

“And you’ll have a pick-up ready?”

“At Zone Four.”  Pidge shot off another code, this one in text form, to her Marmora contact, telling them to get to the right Zone.  They’d be arriving in five minutes, just after the ambulance.  She could hear Allura in the background, counting aloud to herself.  “Is… is Dag okay?”

“Paramedic Two administered an anticonvulsant and the episode will be over in a few hours at most.  I, ah… provoked one of his quirks.”

That was code for ‘exploited the fact that Keith’s genetic make-up is fucked five times to Sunday, probably by feeding him a baby aspirin’.  Keith was questionable as a human; he could eat anything known to man, including things that made Shiro and Pidge sick as hell, but children’s medication could take him out for an entire day.  Pidge giggled.  That was now item number two on the never-letting-go-of-this list.  She couldn’t wait to see Kolivan’s expression.

With that, she detangled herself from Shiro’s line, promising him that she would see him tonight.  The bomb squad was almost done—presumably once they finished their sweep of the top floor they would find Agent Harris, and Shiro would have a heads up to get them on the road, so long as he was still listening to Harris’s comm.  So close—they were so close to freedom now.  Everyone was going to be fine.

When Pidge tuned back into Lance’s call, he was talking about building a dummy made of cadaver parts and switching it out with Keith to fool the SWAT man.

“—except obviously I can’t do it, because what if I touch him and the room lights up in fireworks?  Oh, and I think Mr. Muscles back there is catching on because he keeps turning his head toward me and I can’t tell where he’s looking but I SWEAR he’s looking right at me, oh god we’re here what do I do—"

“Lance.  Take a breath, finish your job, and just… stop getting stupid ideas, maybe?”

“Right.  Right right right right.  Cool.  Okay, Pidge, goodbye, I’ll use my one phone call to let you know how badly I screwed up.”

He’d be fine.  Shiro would take care of him.  Now all that was left was to head back to the huddle of vehicles still outside the EUB, make an excuse about having the runs, and forget that the last seven torturous minutes ever happened.

Pidge stood from her crouch, her legs whining pitifully, and felt the room swim around her.  Yeah… make that the last seven _hours_.

* * *

All it took was a few seconds.  As Paramedic Two brought Keith to the waiting medical staff at Balmera Hospital, Shiro caught the driver with a wave on the pretense of thanking him.  With Keith still in sight, he raised the SWAT mask just far enough to wink once.  If Shiro thought the guy was jumpy behind the wheel of a two-ton wailing box, he was even worse when he realized that not one, but _both_ Lions had just passed through.  He was quick on the uptake, Shiro gave him that, as he jogged after his ‘perp’.  Hopefully _quick_ meant that he understood when to leave things be.

Keith was coming to, his eyes open and tracking but still with a haze that indicated he wasn’t all the way there yet.  He blinked twice at the SWAT mask as he was transferred into a bed in a curtained room just off the ER, a look of revulsion swimming under the bleariness.  Shiro could have laughed.

He didn’t have time, because it was right then that the ruse was discovered.

Shiro slipped out the door as two nurses began the intake, walking purposefully toward the bathroom.  In a stall, he stripped himself of the SWAT gear, stowing all of it aside from the headset piece by piece in the ceiling for a Marmora agent to come and collect.  His full-body marmora jumpsuit was a quick and easy fix—he just flipped it inside out and put it back on, the reverse design as nondescript as they came.  On his way out he grabbed a facemask from a holder near the door with a sign that said _Be Kind!  Cover Your Cough! :)_  The taser and the handcuff keys got tucked away in his pocket.  At the nurse’s station, all he had to do was ask them to page the two nurses—Garrett and Shay—to a room a floor up, please, it was an emergency.  They did.  If it wasn’t exactly what he needed to happen, he would have raised an eyebrow—there was no way they were supposed to leave a patient who was cuffed and under a police hold alone, without supervision.  What gave?

He figured it out when he opened the door and saw the paramedic from before hovering over the bed, the picture of awkward, his hands spread and raised in a very conspicuous display of ‘I’m not touching you!’

The guy swung on his toes the moment the curtain opened, finger pointing at Shiro’s chest and his mouth open in an O.  “You!  You really are who I think you are!  …Aren’t you?”

Leaning over Keith, who was now squinting like he was in pain, and getting to work on the cuffs probably answered that question.  “We don’t have long,” Shiro said, looking pointedly over.  The guy flinched away, making room for Keith to maneuver.  Keith was sitting up in seconds, his limbs slow and trembly, one hand pressed to his head.  Working fast, Shiro stripped him of his hood and torn suit, glancing around to see if there was a gown he could grab.

Instead, a shaking hand held out a folded blue uniform.  “It’s a—my extra uniform, I keep it in the ambulance.  You could have, uh, grabbed it.”

Shiro took it with his prosthesis.  “Thanks.”

The guy stared.  This was just getting awkward.  For a high stakes hospital-break, the whole thing was incredibly and painfully uncomfortable.  Keith growled in the back of his throat, pawing for the clothes as if he could sense it too, despite the fact that he was basically on autopilot.

“Okay then!”  The paramedic—an L. Alvarez according to the name patch on both the uniforms—raised one thumb in something like a wave.  He jerked his entire body toward the open window, saying, “I guess this is my cue to leave, so—okay.”  And then, with the grace of a gazelle on ice, he hauled himself over the sill and out.  And then popped his head back in to gesture at Keith and say, “Hey!  Don’t you dare forget me!”  He dropped back out of sight, this time for good.

What the _shit_.

Shiro didn’t have time to worry about it.  No alarms were going off, but the hospital was undoubtedly on high alert by now.  There would be security at every entrance, not to mention the cameras in the hallways and the legions of nurses.  Which honestly was not a problem—it was nothing that Shiro hadn’t taken on before.  But, for once, he figured he maybe ought to make it easier on Katie by not taking the most direct route through the thick of it.  She sounded stressed to hell and back during their last chat.

Taking a leaf out of Alvarez’s book, Shiro assessed the window situation.  Better than the one at the bank, that was for sure.  They were on the ground floor, facing a parking lot that shared an edge with the ambulance lane.  The other direction was buildings—brightly lit, but close enough that Shiro could get them lost in there in half a minute.

Holding Keith up by the armpit after hauling his boneless form out the window, that’s exactly what he did.  Sirens were on their way, but they were still a few minutes out and those few minutes were all they needed—the black Blade of Marmora truck was idling on a street corner just a block down, license plate artfully splattered in mud so as to be unreadable.  Like magic, the door opened and two enormous arms scooped Keith right up, pulling him inside so that Shiro could scoot up next to him and close the door—after tossing out the FBI headset, at last.

All in all, not too shabby.  Shiro relaxed into the seat.

This was the last time they did anything that unprepared, he promised himself.  He hoped Katie could make it home tonight before the lecture so that he wouldn’t have to hear it twice.

* * *

Allura was NOT going to make it home tonight.

She thought it was going to be a normal day.  Way back before her shift started, when it was just her and Lance hanging out at the ice cream place, she’d been naïve enough to assume it would be pretty boring, today.  The highlight of the shift would probably happen before the shift even began—Lance had just started another of his impulse-binges, which were usually on both ice cream and whatever weird-ass documentary-style crud he was currently into.  Today it was coffee-flavored soft-serve and Black Lion heists.

The two of them had been to several in person, and generally speaking, they weren’t all that exciting.  Emergency vehicles had to stay behind the SWAT line, so all the action happened far enough away to be just short of boring.  Bring a pair of binoculars and maybe you’d see shadowed shapes running around in windows up above, and the SWAT team organizing to storm the building.  For someone who was never into action movies, it was all just a nice break from zooming around the city on false Code 99 calls.

Or so she thought.  She _assumed_.  One of these days, she’d remember that you couldn’t assume _anything_ when it came to Lance Alvarez.

They arrived on scene with the rest of the emergency vehicles.  Just like last time, just like normal.  But this time, Lance didn’t get out of the cab with her to lean on the side and bitch about all the fanfare the Lions got.  No, he was hungover and, she assumed—again with the assumptions— _cranky,_ now that his sugar high was coming back down.  He was probably in there using up his data to watch a livestream instead of coming outside into the hubbub and getting a first-hand view.

Whatever.  He could do what he wanted.  As weird as he’d been this shift, it wasn’t anything so out of the ordinary as to cause worry.  So she left him to it, instead chatting up some of her fellow responders—right up until the bomb went off in the side street on the far side of the building, over a thousand feet above their heads.

And boy, was _that_ a deviation that got her attention.

For all their dramatics and fanfare, the Lions were known for one thing: leaving no trace behind.  No video, no lasting damage, and certainly no viable fingerprints with which they could be tracked and traced.  They were good at what they did, always staying a step ahead of the FBI and never once resorting to anything more violent than strobes and caltrops.  The explosion?   _Not_ their normal style.

Allura’s head whipped toward the heavens as the blast ballooned out into the sky.

The debris hit nothing but an armored truck, according to the chatter, but Allura’s eyes grew wide anyway, turning this way and that to look at the unreachable expanse of the rooftop above their heads as if she’d see more and more of the building crumbling away.  They were already a block away but the first responders all around them were getting pushed back even further from the scene, and it was only a matter of time before Allura and Lance would have to do the same.

Allura focused on the building, a sudden longing to get closer dogging her heels.  What was it really like, facing down the masked vigilantes?  SWAT mask to gasmask, face to face… it seemed somewhat romantic suddenly.  To fight under the power of the very law itself, taking down the Most Wanted and ensuring the security of the private citizen… maybe she’d chosen wrong all those years ago when she picked med school over the police academy.  With an almost wistful sigh, she tried to focus on the action so far beyond their emergency vehicle.

It was then that she felt a tug at her elbow, dragging her sideways into the cab of the ambulance just in time to see Lance’s panicked face.  He was obviously not feeling the same way as she was about the whole thing.  Maybe the explosion had given him a bit of a second-take?

Oh, yeah.  Definitely.  “Allura, you’re like a sister to me—” he began, all flop-sweat and wide eyes, holding desperately tight to her arms through her uniform.

Allura tried not to roll her eyes at him.  If this was a ‘we nearly died, please make out with me’ speech he was already going about it the worst possible way.  Besides: “I’m like a sister to _Veronica_.  You were the bratty kid who wouldn’t leave us alone.”

He swallowed, staring past her at the windshield.  “—okay so you’re like a sister to my sister, whatever, point is I need you to just— _just_ —”

Whatever he was trying to say was cut off by the bomb-squad, knocking on the window.  As the first ambulance on the scene, Ambulance 1, they were cordially invited to don bomb-squad suits and attend to a medical emergency at the scene.  Ooh, how exciting!  Allura nearly squealed, clapping her hands together.

Beside her, Lance turned a cheese-like color.  His speech died on his tongue and his resolve oozed out from his eyes, making way for pure-blooded _panic_.

He held himself together, at least.  Through the bomb-squad’s safety instructions and suiting up and all the way up until they were ready to bring out the gurney.

“What did you want to say to me?” she whispered as they waited at the door, leaning in close to keep her voice down.

He jumped anyway, twitchy as all hell.  “Nothing!  Nothing, no one, there’s no one thing to worry about!  I mean, sure, there’s plenty of—of _small_ things to worry about, but nothing _important_ , no no no!”

She should have worried.  She knew that now.  She should have worried her ass off.  Alas, she did not.  She just buckled down and did her job and, unless her eyes were deceiving her, Lance and SWAT Man just shared a Moment.  Unfair, really, because if anyone should’ve gotten a moment with the Hot SWAT Man, it was definitely not Lance, who had apparently used up all of his brain cells freaking the fuck out and only had broken english left to use afterward.  And yet there he went, disappearing after Smoldering Hot SWAT Man with his spare uniform, of all things, clutched to his chest.

Did he think he was going to get _laid_?

An interesting development.  Allura leaned against the side of the ambulance, waiting for her partner’s return with a slight smirk on her face.  He came from around the side of the building—a strange place to proposition someone.  His uniform was no longer in his hands.  He was tight-lipped as he hauled himself up into the shotgun seat, refusing to tell her any details whatsoever, which was… not like him, honestly.  If he even half-suspected a girl could be his soulmate, he was impossible to shut up.  Something was off.  Something was _wrong_.

She and Lance had just pulled out of the hospital lot when the police barricade went up and their dispatcher called in to tell them to stay put and wait for the FBI agents.  Making sure to level a glare over at Lance—he was acting so _weird_ , sitting completely still and sweating through his uniform shirt like that—she pulled to the side of the road and set in to wait.

At this point, she was just beginning to realize how much shit Lance had gotten himself into.  Anyone who knew the man would probably tell you that piles of manure were his specialty (the dumpster fire incident came to mind), but this was, by all accounts, a doozy.  She kept both hands on the wheel as she slowly turned the full weight of her glare onto the side of his sweat-streaked face.  A shudder rolled through him as if he could feel the pressure.

She’d once promised to only use her power for good.  She figured this counted.  She honed the glare until it was like a laser, focused right on his temple.

“So, about that hockey game!” he squeaked.

“Lance.”

“Yeah, I liked it, too—their knife shoes were pretty sharp, huh?  Huh?”

“I’m only going to ask this once.”

“Uuuuuuuuuh have you ever skated?  I haven’t but I’ve always wanted to try it o—”

“What have you _done_?”

He pressed his lips together, fresh sweat starting to collect on his face.  It took him about five seconds to break.  Bowing under tension so thick it rivaled the ice cream they’d shared earlier, Lance pulled out his phone with shaking hands and passed it over, tacking on a desperate plea for her to delete the messages after she read them.

* * *

The heist went down at sunset.  By the time twenty minutes were up, the entire FBI and just about every known responder was on scene.  Half an hour in, and one Lion was in containment, the other supposedly fleeing across rooftops.  Forty-five minutes in, the ambulance was on its way to the hospital.  And a full fifty-eight minutes after the whole debacle began, Shiro and Keith were both safely on a Marmora transport, leaving behind nothing but broken gear in their wake.

Pidge would have slumped in her seat if the bomb squad and SWAT team weren’t just finishing up their sweep of the building.  Agent Harris was in Ambulance 2, racing toward the hospital along with half of the FBI fleet, en route to apprehend two Lions who were, if everything went according to plan, nothing more than ghosts in the system.

And they did, and they were—they got away.  For the first time in twenty-four hours, something went according to plan.  Now all Pidge had to do was the rest of her job, the rest of the Lion cleanup, get through a patented Kolivan lecture…

God, why did it never end?

For the Grid, Dagger, and Key, the night was a bust.  On the forensics end, tonight was a veritable _goldmine_.  Actual live footage, the remnants of the grenade and the Shield that it took out, a close-up look at Keith and, worst of all, Shiro’s mask—there was no way Pidge was going to be able to clean all of this up, at least not tonight, and definitely not in the state she was in.

Pidge worked intake as the rest of the crew combed the building, her colleagues bringing back more and more bagged things for her to enter into the computer database.  Her fingers shook and skated over the keyboard as she tried to focus.  Chip from camera #358, camera #367, camera #391… footage marked with metadata for easy access… microfiber scraped from the concrete on the rooftop… bagged and labeled… a hair from the stretcher they used to carry Keith down the stairwell… bagged and…

…bagged and…

…god, they got a hair.  A hair that could be directly traced back to Keith, unlike the usual detritus they turned up during forensics sweeps of public buildings.  They were going to have to stay under the radar for a long time, assuming they got through tonight and the next few days unscathed, and that meant more time for Zarkon and his witch to pull their strings and play their games, more time that Matt and her dad had to keep to the underground, wherever they were out there, more time without contact and more time without justice and—

“Hey, you okay?” asked a voice.  Pidge raised her head off the desk where it had fallen to find the kind face of Curtis, one of Iverson’s top forensics guys, peering worriedly down at her.

“Yeah,” she said, letting her voice go rough.  She cleared her throat and sat all the way up again, returning her focus to the massive amounts of data streaming across her screen.  She needed to parse this, to divide it up and store it properly, she didn’t have time to be thinking about Matt or… or her dad…

A hand gently pulled her chair back from the makeshift desk in the back of the van.  “Go home, Pidge,” Curtis said.  “You look dead on your feet.”

“Yeah, I’m…”  She stared at the screen for another long minute, her mind buzzing away, before she pushed herself to her feet.  “I’ll go,” she said.  Curtis clapped her on the back, right on top of her binder, and she walked out of the van pulling her hood up over her short hair.

She did not go home.  Instead she walked fifteen paces away and caught a late-night bus back to the FBI building, her fingers swiping away at her phone.  Allura’s initial statement was already in the system by the time she arrived, several hours after the sweep of the hospital turned up nothing but an empty bed where Keith was supposed to be.  They would be conducting more in-depth interrogations in the days to come, looking for further details and cross-examining everyone involved for inconsistencies, but this was good enough for now—Pidge had enough information to start falsifying a statement from Lance to file beside Allura’s.

One false statement, one power nap in an empty evidence room far away from the Lions buzz, and one more cup of coffee later, she walked into one of the civilian waiting rooms to collect the man himself.  He was sitting alone in a corner of the room, his head in one hand and his knee bouncing ceaselessly away, making his plastic chair inch along the floor.

God, did he have to look so guilty?  If he was going to survive this he needed a crash course in keeping it cool, _stat_.

Pidge announced her presence by giving him a solid smack to the back of the head.  “Oi.  I fabricated a statement for you.  It corroborates Allura’s story, but I added a few embellishments just because I know you.”

He startled, coming back to reality all at once.  “That seems illegal.  Aren’t there, like, bugs all over this place?  Are you even allowed to say that inside this building without getting arrested?”

“It is _highly_ illegal.  It really, really is.  And yes, there is a camera and four microphones in this room.  I have my phone set up to interface with them and give them a false recording to store in the databanks.”  She hauled him to his feet, none too gently, and started them walking for the door.  She kept her face forward, expression pleasant for the cameras down the hallway as she spoke out of the side of her mouth.  “Now for real—how much does Allura actually know?”

If Lance were a dog, his tail would be between his legs.  Just as Pidge suspected.  “Everything.  She knows everything.  Oh, god, I spilled to her the moment she turned that _look_ on me—"

Incredible.  Pidge made a mental note to readjust her Lance Interrogation Calculations (LIC), because she was off by an order of magnitude of way too many.  She needed to buy Allura a drink.

Lance was still talking.  Had been for some time.  Pidge rubbed her ear until the droning became words again, tuning in to hear, “—he’ll be okay, right?  I mean, it’s not like your boss has anything to go off of, right?  Right?”

Pidge closed her eyes.  They were twenty feet from the front door.  Fifteen.  Ten.  Five, four, three, two, and…

Outside.  She took a deep breath of the city air, letting the vague scent of old socks seep into her lungs.  “They have enough, Lance.  The Lions won’t be able to show their masks any time soon, and that’s assuming that they can’t be tracked by the data recovered from the ambulance’s vitals monitors—”

“No, they—they can’t do that, there’s no—no!”

“What the hell are you going to do about it?” Pidge demanded, turning sharply toward the parking garage.  She tended to park in the outskirts of the structure to keep the familiarity between her life and her co-workers to a bare minimum, claiming that she needed the exercise when anyone asked.  Tonight the climb felt like torture.

What was worse was Lance going silent beside her.  She cast one look over and groaned.  “No,” she whined, tipping her head back.  “ _Nooo_.”

“Please, Pidgey!  You’re amazing, a genius—you can sneak your way into the FBI database and, like, do that thing where you try and open the files and they glitch out—”

“Corrupt the files, you mean.”

“—Yes!  Yes, corrupt the files!  And then you just—whoop!—sneak right back out, no big deal.  I know you can do it—please, you have to help me.  This is my soulmate.  My _soulmate_ , Pidge.”

Face pleading and hands tented in front of his lips, Lance was the picture of ‘desperate’.  He even started getting down onto his knees before Pidge hauled him back to his feet.  She turned her face toward the sky and whatever deity was in charge of her run of bad luck.  Did Lance understand that he was asking her to _break the law_?  Screw the fact that she was going to do it anyway—she took offense to the idea that he could just casually ask her to put her job and her freedom on the line for his _soulmate_ and she was just supposed to _do it_.  With a disgusted snort, she shoved Lance face first into her car, closing her eyes as she took the driver’s seat.  Keith and Shiro had disappeared into the night—they would be getting new burner phones soon, maybe even as they spoke, assuming Keith hadn’t straight up keeled over from exhaustion.  Marmora would be doing what they did best: working from the shadows to clean up any evidence left at the hospital before the FBI found it.  Allura was hopefully at home, probably stewing on the story that Lance spun for her.  And Pidge… she just wanted tonight to be over.

“Look… I know this is hard,” she said, hands tight on the steering wheel of the silent car.

“You, uh, you do?” Lance asked.  He’d buckled himself in, huddled down so far in his seat that he looked almost like a child.  The hopeful look he cast her way only made the comparison more stark.

Pidge nodded, steeling herself.  “I’m going to tell you something that you can’t tell anyone else, or I could lose my job.  Understand?”

“Yeah, Pidgey, of course.  You can trust me.”

She frowned at him critically.  He had the decency to squirm.  She sighed.  “Just… try to keep it to yourself, that’s all I ask.”  He bobbed his head encouragingly.  She took it on herself to grit her teeth and continue.  “…When I was in middle school, my dad and my brother got into a whole lot of trouble.  They owed too much money to too many people and couldn’t pay off their debt, despite my dad’s salary and my brother’s side-ventures.  After a year of stress, my dad had a serious heart attack, and in order to save his life, my brother took him and went into hiding.  So… yeah.  I know how hard it is to want to be close to someone that you’re forced to keep your distance from.”

She started the car, leaving those words to settle in Lance’s head as she cranked up a mindless pop station and drove him home.  He meekly told her to get some rest before he cleared his throat and closed the passenger side door as softly as he could.  She stared straight ahead through her windshield.

She did not get some rest.  Instead she grit her teeth and drove herself to the predetermined safe-house, her foot on the brakes like a little old lady as she squinted blearily out the windshield.

The Marmora crowd, like the FBI crowd, was still all abuzz about the night.  Instead of celebrating inches gained, however, they were mourning miles lost.

“About time,” Kolivan said, rising from his chair the moment she walked in the door.  “Well?  Full report.”

She gave it, along with a usb drive full of copies of all the digital evidence that she’d been able to duplicate.  “I’ll get you a full damage report after my shift tomorrow,” she promised.

Kolivan’s mask of a face twitched, the scar over his eye jumping with barely restrained frustration.  “Understood,” he said shortly.  He turned away.

Pidge coughed nervously.  “And… my reprimand, Sir?”

“Tomorrow,” came the short reply.

She accepted it, too tired to do anything else.  Tonight was so close to being over… she just had one more thing to—

“ _Katie_.”

Nuts.  “Shiro, oh god.  I—the windows—”

The apology wasn’t even out when Shiro cut her off.  With very little warning, he swept her up into a crushing hug.  “It’s okay.  It’s okay.  I’m just glad everyone made it out today.  We cut it too close.”

Pidge hugged back, her small arms barely making it all the way around Shiro’s big shoulders.  If there were tears in the corners of her eyes, no one had to know.  She laughed a little, the sound funny to her own ears.  “That was my fault, though, I—Shiro, I forgot the windows, and the print in the database, and—”

“I know.”

“I’m _so sorry_.”

“It’s _okay_.”

“No, it’s really no—”

“Katie, everyone makes mistakes.”

Not Pidge.  You didn’t make mistakes when your friends, your family, were all on the line.  Mistakes cost lives.  If anyone here knew that, it was Shiro.

Unfortunately, she didn’t have the energy to argue about it.  “…Let’s just drop it,” she sighed, pushing her nose into Shiro’s neck.  “Where’s Keith?” she mumbled instead.

One more tight squeeze and Shiro dropped her back to her own two feet, steadying her when she wobbled.  “He’s in the back.  You want to talk to him about this Alvarez character, huh?”

Oh, god, she had to do that now, didn’t she?  Shiro laughed at the resignation on her face before pushing her toward the medical rooms of the Marmora home-base.

She found Keith sitting up in one of the bunks, munching on a cucumber with an IV in his hand.  He looked the same as ever, despite the long night he’d had—long fluff of hair pretending to be bangs lying across his nose, hood drawn up over his head, face pale but eyes bright in the dim light.

“Hey, Grid.  Sup?” he said when he caught sight of her, as if he hadn’t spent a good half hour of the night having near-constant seizures because of a damn baby aspirin.  Pidge hauled herself up on the bed beside him, stealing a bite of his food and immediately regretting it when a sour taste flooded her mouth.

“God, what the fuck is this?” she asked, looking for something to spit into.  There was nothing—she chewed and swallowed, gagging the whole way.

Keith looked at his cucumber—over-ripe, most likely—as if he hadn’t noticed it before.  “Uh… is this a trick question?”

“You’re an animal.”

“It’s food.”

“It’s spoiled food, I—you know what?  I’m not in the mood for this argument.”

Keith laughed, the sound very refreshing after the way his rasping breath rattled over the comms earlier.  “What are you in the mood for, then?”

Pidge adjusted her feet, kicking until she’d pushed her converse under Keith’s neglected blanket.  “Do you even remember the paramedic?”

He thought hard for a long moment, brow pinched.  “Yeah, no, not really.  Do I really need to?”

“He’s the guy who matched the Lion print.”

“Right.  The soulmate.  Shiro told me about that.”

Unconcerned, Keith took another bite of his ‘food’ and munched away.  Pidge stared.  “And… aren’t you concerned about him?  Like, a little bit?”

“Why should I be?  It’s a fifty/fifty chance that he’s not my problem, yeah?   _Less_ than fifty/fifty.”

Oh, here they go.  “Keith.  Buddy.  My guy.  My man.”

Keith rolled his eyes over, tilting his head to the side.  “Fine, I’ll bite.  How do you know that Shiro isn’t his soulmate?” he asked.

“Well, one, did you see how hard Allura was pining after Shiro?”

Another brow pinch.  “No.  But I did see Shiro open her facebook page on Ulaz’s handheld.”

“See?”

“It could be a fling, we don’t know anything.  You know how bad Shiro fell for Adam.”

“And Ulaz.”

“ _And_ Ulaz.”

“Okay, point made, but it’s not like that.  Well, maybe it is, but Shiro definitely isn’t going to leave her for Lancey Lance.”

Keith threw his non-IV hand up in the air, as if asking for patience from the shitty ceiling tiles.  “How do you _know_?  Stop being cryptic!”

She wriggled her right hand in front of his face.  “The big secret isn’t that secret, bud.  His Print is right-handed.”

“His—it’s—what?”

And there he went.  Keith stared down at his own hand, his expression going blank.

“Pidge,” he whispered.

“Keith.”

“Pidge, I have a soulmate.”

“That you do, bud.”

“I…”

The rest of the words trailed off, leaving Keith sitting there dumbly staring at his hand.   _The_ hand.  The one that was imprinted on the back of Lance’s neck.  The one that was destined to actuate the Print that fate left on Lance’s skin.

Pidge patiently waited for more to come out—some classic denial, maybe—but Keith remained silent.  Processing.  They still had a lot to talk about, but he probably wanted to talk to Shiro first, and besides…

With a deep yawn, Pidge snuggled up to Keith’s side, hooking her chin over his shoulder and throwing an arm across his stomach.  “Wake me up when you’re ready to talk,” she said.  She slipped off the deep end just like that, Keith’s steady breathing lulling her under.  Finally, after everything, she got to sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's been sooner than 8 months, GO ME! We'll try for another 3 months or less for the next chapter, yeah?

**Author's Note:**

> Do you ever think of a soulmate AU and then two hours later it turns into a Heist AU and then two weeks after that you have an Epic Story outlined and the first two chapters are nearly finished? Yeah... I like it when that happens. I'm over at the-ghost-of-keith-kogane.tumblr.com if you want to come talk!


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